


So deeply was he loved

by irisdouglasiana



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Canon compliant-ish, F/M, Lots of Crying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 12:23:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17725133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisdouglasiana/pseuds/irisdouglasiana
Summary: Ivar is, in the end, not a god but a man, and Freydis knows he is afraid in the way men are afraid.





	So deeply was he loved

_“The queen of Kattegat is here,” the seer says with a grin when she comes in from the cold and shuts the door. “Freydis, wife of Ivar. Daughter of Helle, who was a slave, and her mother before her. The girl on the tightrope. I know why you have come.”_

_“Then tell me, Wise One,” she says amiably. She takes a seat beside him and rests her hand on her stomach. Baldur woke her early that morning with his kicking, and she in turn woke Ivar, who traced his fingers lightly along her belly and smiled before going back to sleep. He still surprises her with his tenderness sometimes._

_The seer chuckles. “You wish to know the fate of your son. I will tell you a story instead. It is one you have heard many times, but I think that old stories may yet teach us new lessons. Here is how it begins:_

_“When fair Baldur, son of Odin, dreamed that he would die, his mother Frigga made all the things on the earth and sea and sky swear they would not harm him. Fire, water, metal, rocks, beasts great and small, they all made oaths; so deeply was he loved.”_

_“Except the mistletoe,” Freydis says. She knows this story well. “Frigga did not ask the mistletoe to swear because she thought it could not harm him. And so Baldur was killed by it, through Loki’s treachery.”_

_The seer shakes his head. “The mistletoe pierced Baldur’s heart, and Loki guided its path, but those things did not truly kill him.”_

_Freydis drops her hand from her belly to her side. “I do not understand.”_

_He reaches out and grabs her hand. His skin is as cold as ice and his grip is like iron. “It was Frigga, you see? She could think of every harm that might come to her son except for what was right in front of her. He died because her imagination failed. Her love was not enough.”_

**

“Tell me about your mother,” Freydis had asked him once, and he had looked at her, stretched out on the bed beside him, bathed in the glow of the evening light, and told her everything. Of her love for him, her pride, her strength, her sadness. How she had done her best to protect him, and how in the end, he had not been able to protect her.

“I envy you,” she had told him. “I envy you because you knew your mother. But my mother died when I was very young, and I have nothing of hers to hold onto. I cannot even remember her face.” She lifted his hand and placed it on her stomach. “I want our son to know who we are,” she had said. “I do not want him to grow up only hearing stories of us. I want him to know how much he is loved.”

On the lonely road east, in the pouring rain, in the freezing cold, hungry and thirsty and exhausted, Ivar thinks of her and he thinks of his mother and he wonders what they would say if they could see him now. If they would be disappointed, if they would turn away in disgust. If they would love him still. He catches a glimpse of them from time to time: a flash of blond hair just out of the corner of his eye; the silhouette of a tall woman standing in front of the fire, her back turned to him. Then they vanish and he is alone again.

There is something broken inside him, something bleeding and aching and lost. A part of him has always known that. For a little while, he thought things could be different, that he could be whole after all, but it had only been a dream. He does not think it can be fixed.

**

_“Ivar, you are in the way,” Freydis informs him gently. “The midwives are too kind to say so.” Another contraction passes through her and she gasps and squeezes his hand until it’s over._

_“I don’t want to leave you,” he says stubbornly. The two women have been rushing around them, hauling buckets of water and bundles of cloth, and she knows he can’t easily dodge out of their way, not with the braces on his legs. She has never seen him so anxious and uncertain._

_“Stay close, beloved,” she tells him with a reassuring smile. “Don’t be afraid.”_

_He brushes the damp hair out of her face and kisses her forehead before reluctantly pushing himself up and stepping aside. “Why would I be afraid?” he asks, but his voice cracks a little and gives him away. “All will be well.”_

**

In his head, he carries on conversations with Freydis. “This is hard for you, because you were born the son of a king,” he imagines her telling him. He can almost picture her sitting on the cart beside him, not dressed as a queen, but how she looked when he had first seen her back in York. “You have always been able to rely on your parents’ fame and your descendance from the gods. Now you have to learn how to be something else.”

“What, a cripple, a nobody?” he asks bitterly.

She raises her eyebrows. “You always told me you hated to be pitied, isn’t that so? But I think no one feels sorrier for you than you do for yourself.”

“Go away,” he mutters out loud.

She obligingly gathers her skirts and jumps off the cart. “You are not the only one who lost everything, Ivar,” she calls after him. “Other people had dreams too.”

**

_She should have known what Ivar intended to do. She should have known._

_But she had still been delirious and happy and so very tired when he gave her the tea. “The women said you must drink this and rest,” he said as he took Baldur from her, and she drank it without question._

_“Our divine child,” she told him drowsily, feeling the warmth spread through her body. “Oh, how I have dreamed of this day.”_

_“Mm,” was all he said before looking away, and she thought nothing of it at the time, but now, when it is already too late—she remembers that moment, Ivar looking somewhere else, not at her, not at Baldur in his arms._

_She tells Ingrid this down by the shore, sitting on the sand with her knees pulled up against her chest, letting the words tumble out of her. She had sat silently in the great hall and listened to Ivar lie about what he had done and she had to tell someone the truth. “I am so angry at him,” she mumbles, picking at the hem of her skirt. “My anger eats away at me and leaves me hollow inside.” She does not tell Ingrid that in the middle of the night, sometimes, she has thought about the place where Ivar keeps his knives. How easy it would be to take one in her hands and push the blade between his ribs while he sleeps._

_“The baby could not feed, dearest,” Ingrid tells Freydis gently as she strokes her hair. She must see the fingerprint-shaped bruises he left on her neck, but she does not mention them. “Baldur would not have survived. Ivar did not do it to be cruel.”_

_“No. No,” she whispers. Her eyes sting with tears. “You are wrong. It was never about Baldur at all; it was always about himself, about who he is. And it was not his choice to make alone. I woke and Baldur was already gone.” He did it because, in the end, he was not a god but a man—afraid in the way men are afraid, stupid in the way men are stupid, weak in the way men are weak. More than anything, it is his weakness that leaves a bitter taste in her mouth. He thinks he is the only one to ever know pain. He thinks he is the only one who suffers. He said he loved her and maybe he even believed it, but he did not love her; he could never. You do not do such things to the people you love._

_“It is a very difficult thing, to lose a child,” Ingrid murmurs carefully. Ingrid has always been like a mother to her, and Freydis knows that none of the older women’s children survived to adulthood. “But it is not uncommon. Both of you are young, and you will surely have more children soon.”_

_Freydis freezes and then pulls back. Ingrid’s expression betrays nothing, but the implication is clear:_ if he is capable. If Baldur was even his son. If he does not kill you first. _She is waiting for an admission, a confession, a piece of gossip. “Go away,” Freydis says._

_“Freydis—”_

_“Go away!”_

_Ingrid gathers her skirts and stands. Her lips are pursed. “You have always been good at getting what you want, haven’t you? Now you are a free woman and a queen. I cannot tell you what to do. All I ask is that you remember what I told you about him.”_

_“Leave me alone,” she orders, and Ingrid walks away without another word. But Freydis hasn’t forgotten what she said all those months ago:_

He draws you to him like a moth to the fire. All you see is the light and all you feel is heat, and you forget what he really is. In the end, he will burn you. That is his nature. He cannot help it.

**

In his dreams, she wraps her slender hands around his neck and starts to squeeze. "I love you, Ivar," she whispers in his ear as he struggles to breathe and his vision begins to blur. "See how much I love you?"

**

I’m sorry, _he tells her._ For all that I do. I’m sorry. _Freydis waits until he has shuffled away and she can no longer hear his halting footsteps before she climbs out of bed, takes his empty cup, and hurls it at the wall as hard as she can._

 _She does not want to hear_ sorry _, does not want to look at his eyes, red and swollen from crying, does not want him to ask her to forgive him when he cannot even say out loud what he is begging her forgiveness for—for taking Baldur away from her and leaving him for the foxes, for telling her it was her fault, for lying about what he had done, for putting his hands on her?_ Sorry, forgive me, _and then what? No apology will bring Baldur back, and so she does not care if he is sorry. She wants her son. He cannot give her that._

_Besides, he is not sorry enough. Not yet._

**

Freydis told him a story of her childhood one time. He does not think of it until much later, when he is watching the sun set over a lake in a foreign land. He remembers it had been the end of a long midsummer day, and they had been sitting down by the docks while watching the slaves practice walking the tightrope. She had taken off her shoes to dip her feet into the water, and he had watched the ripples moving outwards and admired the easy grace of her movements, loved the warmth of her breath in his ear when she leaned in to tell him something.

“I did that, as a girl,” she had said, pointing to the tightrope. “I was always the best. I never fell. This is not a boast; it is true,” she added when she saw him smile. “There is a trick to it.”

Some part of him had been jealous, but some other part of him had wanted to know. He reached out and took her hand. “And what trick is that?”

Her voice was quiet but steady. “You must forget everything around you—the voices of the people watching, the boys jostling the rope and laughing. You must not look down, because it will make you think about falling, and then you will fall. Close your eyes, if you have to. Trust your feet to guide you. And never look down.” 

It all feels like it happened to someone else. In the life he has now, he lies alone on a bed of straw, staring up at the night sky and shivering, and he pictures the girl that she was, standing on the rope with her arms outstretched and back straight and her face perfectly still. She hovers just beyond his reach. During the day, he can tell himself she made him do it, but at night, it is not so easy. When the sun sinks below the horizon his mind always circles back to her standing in the great hall, with his enemies closing in around them. She had looked him in the eye without hesitation or fear and told him what she had done. _I let them in._

She could have run, but she didn’t. She wanted him to know. She looked, she fell, and she pulled him down with her. He’s been falling ever since.

**

Is it fate when fathers fail their sons? Perhaps it is better to say that it is, so then the fault lies with no one but the gods. But perhaps it is worse, because if fathers are fated to fail, then nothing can be done to change it.

Or maybe it does not matter either way—maybe all that matters is the fact of their failure. The fact of an infant left in the woods, the icy wind whistling through the leaves, the dew forming on the tips of the grass. No one hears his cries, no one comes to comfort him. He is all alone. Maybe that is the end for him, but if it is not, if he is saved—you must believe that even if he cannot remember the details, he remembers the cold. The cold lingers in the marrow of his bones; it settles in at the base of his skull. The cold stays with him all his life.

In Ivar’s dreams, he is a baby again, and Ragnar sits with him in the forest where he left Baldur. “Oh, Ivar,” Ragnar sighs as he cradles him in his arms. “Oh, my son. Do you think it would have been better if you had died? Do you wish you had never been born?”

Ivar opens his mouth to answer, but his voice comes out as an infant’s thin wail. His cries are suffocated by the woods; they are swallowed up by the night.

“I was wrong about many things in my life,” his father tells him softly. “I did many things I was ashamed of, and I died with many regrets. I made countless mistakes.” Ragnar blinks back tears and bends down to kiss his forehead. “Your life is yours; your mistakes are your own. But you, my son—your life was not a mistake. You were never a mistake. Forgive me. Forgive yourself, if you can.”

Ivar cannot stop himself. He cries and cries, and when he wakes, his face is wet with his tears. He instinctively reaches out for Freydis, but she is not there. It takes him a moment to remember he killed her and left her body in the great hall. She should be at his side now, resting peacefully in their own bed, and their son should be asleep in his cradle. He closes his eyes and weeps. _It wasn’t supposed to be like this,_ he’d tell them if they were here. _I didn’t mean for it to happen this way. All those things I thought were important, they didn’t matter in the end. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry._

**

_The seer takes Freydis by the hand and leads her to the underworld. Her body is so light, she feels like she could fly. “You did not tell the rest of the story of Frigga and Baldur, Wise One,” she says softly. “Shall I tell you how it ends?_

_“After Baldur was killed by the mistletoe, Frigga sent swift Hermod to Hel to ask a ransom for his release, and Hel said she would allow it if everything alive and dead would weep for Baldur. Frigga wandered the lonely earth and wept, and the sky and the trees and the rivers and the people wept too. It was Frigga who did this, not Odin, Baldur’s father. It was Frigga who carried Baldur within her body; Frigga who gave him life.” Her voice breaks. “And Frigga failed him twice. She could not bring him back.”_

_“So Baldur lingers in Hel, waiting for the day the world ends, when he will rise again,” the seer finishes. “The things we call endings are not always what they seem, Freydis, mother of Baldur.”_

_He brings her to a stop at the gates of the underworld. It looks like the gates of Kattegat, only without Ivar’s banners hanging from the walls. The sky above her is a dull, flat gray and she can smell the salty wind blowing in from the ocean and the burning of firewood. It smells like home. Beyond those gates, she thinks she would find a mirror image of Kattegat. Ivar will not be waiting for her in this great hall; she alone will rule over the dead._

_“You will have to find your own way from here,” the seer warns her._

_“Haven’t I always?” she asks, and he shakes his head and laughs and is gone._

_The gates open up before her and a woman steps out to greet her. Her blond hair falls in front of her face. In her arms is a baby. Freydis feels her knees go weak when she sees him._

_“You have traveled a long way, my daughter,” her mother tells her. “We have waited for you for so long.” She gives the infant to Freydis and she holds her son close. She cannot take her eyes off of him. He is perfect in every way. It is so obvious to her how perfect he is, how special; it was only Ivar who could not see it._

_“I did not want to die,” she whispers as she looks down at Baldur and touches his cheek. “I wasn’t ready. I thought I would have more time.”_

_Her mother smiles. “Why do we offer sacrifices to the gods, daughter?”_

_“To ask for their favor. To thank them.”_

_“And so I thank the gods for your life. For your son’s life. For your deaths, so we can be together again. Our lives are short and full of pain, but that does not make them any less precious.”_

_Freydis wants to speak, but her voice comes out as a small breathless sob, and all she can do is nod. Sometimes there are no words that can truly tell what is in the heart._

_“Welcome home, my daughter,” her mother murmurs as she takes her by the elbow and leads her through the gates and into the light. “There is a warm hearth waiting for you inside, and tables full of food and drink, and you and I have much to talk about. Come with me, dear one. Come and see.”_


End file.
